Survival Of The Cheapest?


We all want the best solution to win, but that rarely happens. History is littered with products that were superior to the alternatives and yet lost out to a lessor rival. I am sure several examples are going through your mind without me having to list them. It is normally the first to volume that wins, often accelerated by copious amounts of marketing dollar to help push it against headwinds. ... » read more

High-Level Design And High-Level Verification


Not so long ago, some EDA vendors were painting a very attractive picture of chip design in the then-near future. The idea was that an architectural team would write a single description of the complete system in some high-level language, usually C/C++/SystemC, and that a new class of EDA tool would automatically partition the design into hardware and software, choosing the functionality of eac... » read more

Toward A Lingua Franca For Intelligent System Design


As the EDA industry is moving up further and further towards the intelligent design of full systems, this year’s Forum on Design Languages (FDL) offered a great update on the status quo with regard to where languages fit into this transition. It looks like the next step will not be one universal language as previously targeted back when there was a flurry of introductions of new programming m... » read more

Fast-Track Your Early SoC Design Exploration And Verification


By Nermeen Hossam and John Ferguson Most advanced node system-on-chip (SoC) designs are very large, and very complex. They typically contain many blocks and intellectual property (IP) that perform specialized functions, such as computation, internal communications, and signal processing. These blocks are often built by separate teams or IP suppliers, and integrated into the SoC layout. Howev... » read more

Open ISAs Gaining Traction


Open instruction set architectures are starting to gain a foothold, often in combination with other processors, as chipmakers begin to add more specialized compute elements and more flexibility into their designs. There are a number of these open ISAs available today, including Power, MIPS, and RISC-V, and there are a number of permutations and tools available for sale based on those archite... » read more

No More Pizza! The Power Of HPC To Answer: “What’s For Dinner?”


The other night my wife and I were trying to pick a place we could both agree on for dinner. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you know it can be a difficult problem to solve. I decided to short circuit the usual torture by asking our virtual assistant for a solution. “Hey [Virtual Assistant], where’s a good place to eat?” Thus ensued 15 minutes of intermittent, wrong answers, misc... » read more

The Growing Impact Of Portable Stimulus


It has been a year since Accellera's Portable Test and Stimulus Specification became a standard. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact it has had, and the future direction of it, with Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification Systems; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Tom Fitzpatrick, strategic verification architect for Mentor, a Siemen... » read more

Long And Longer Reach SerDes – On The Road Again


We’ve had the pleasure of participating in two events over the past two weeks. I wouldn’t recommend doing two major shows back-to-back, but it has been exhilarating and quite interesting. Our “road trip” began last week in Mountain View for the second annual AI Hardware Summit. You’ve probably noticed you can go to an AI-related show every week (or more) if you like. The trick is to f... » read more

A Specification-Driven Methodology For The Design And Verification Of Reset Domain Crossing Logic


Reset architectures have increased in complexity along with SoC designs. Sadly, traditional reset design and verification techniques have not evolved to address this increase in complexity. In order to avoid ad-hoc reset methods, this paper presents a three-step specification-driven methodology that provides a requirements-based approach for reset domain crossing design and verification. To ... » read more

Better Benchmarks Through Compiler Optimizations: Codasip Jump Threading


The architectural efficiency of embedded processor IP is measured by a small set of industry standard benchmarks, that even though often bear little correlation to real workloads, continue to persist. The most popular benchmarks are Dhrystone and CoreMark. An interesting observation regarding these test suites is that the performance numbers continue to improve for a given architecture, even... » read more

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